After a fulfilling life of four years, I finally retired my trusty iPhone 4S and now am the happy owner of an iPhone 6.
One early discovery on the new phone was the Health app, which can collect an astounding variety of data from the smartphone’s built in sensors and other apps and devices. The data is stored and presented in neat graphs on a dashboard which the user can customize.
There are two apps that I’m using to encourage myself to eat better and exercise. I add information about everything I eat into MyFitnessPal and completing workouts with Fitnet. Both apps sync with Health to provide a detailed report on my dashboard.
Thus far, I have enjoyed watching the app collect and organize these data and I feel like I am getting a great return on a reasonable investment of time and labor. Fitnet, in particular, requires no additional data input. I just follow the videos to complete the workouts and the apps do the rest!
The greatest benefit has been increased mindfulness of my health related choices. Knowing that I’ll need to record a junk food snack or extra serving at dinner is a good deterrent. And getting ‘points’ for workouts is a great motivator! I look forward continuing this inquiry, and seeing how my graphs look with a month of data in them!
